John Atkinson

Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, "If you work in either journalism or politics . . . you will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong." I was reminded of Thompson's words when I read a forum post on our website. "Why is Stereophile way behind the other magazines?" asked "rs350z," explaining that, among things, he objected to Stereophile's supporting its reviews with measurements. "why waste the ink on doing measurements on each product reviewed," he wrote, with a disregard for capital letters. "There is no need to. I don't care if the distortion is 0.00005 or 0.00007, nor do i care about all of the other tests you do. What i care about is the sound, quality, finish, looks."

Before I conclude our coverage of last weekend’s New York Audio Show, let me say that it was a pleasant surprise to find the Marriott’s corridors still busy before the show ended 5pm Sunday. While the show had a smaller number of exhibitors than I would have wished, the venue was excellent and the show was definitely a success and those manufacturers, distributors, and dealers who exhibited all had excellent traffic. Well done, Chester Group.

Billed as “Michael Fremer’s Ultimate Turntable Set-up Demo,” the final seminar at the Brooklyn show once again revealed that the editor of AnalogPlanet.com and Stereophile columnist has, as you might say, “large attachments.” I find setting up a phono cartridge the most stressful of audio-related activities, and that’s in the quiet of my home, with no pressure and all the time in the world. By contrast, Michael does it in public, with the clock ticking, an audience watching, and a high-definition video system showing a close-up of every move on the screen above and behind him.

The Brooklyn show offered a full program of seminars throughout the weekend, and one of the best-attended was "The Virtues of Vintage," which took place late Saturday afternoon. Chaired by Stereophile's Art Dudley (far left), a panel of expert anachrophiles comprising (LR) Steve Rowell (Audio Classics), Mike Trei (Sound & Vision), Jonathan Halpern (Tone Imports), Joe Roberts (Silbatone and once Sound Practices) and Herb Reichert (Stereophile) started off by examining what great components from audio's past had to offer.

The French do things differently. I first heard Triangle loudspeakers at the 1981 Festival du Son, in Paris. That was, of course, after I had obtained admission to the show, in a nonintuitive process in which members of the press obtained their credentials at a booth inside the show. But my experience of the Triangle speaker, a small, three-way floorstander, was positive: It sounded clean and uncolored, and nothing like the BBC-inspired speakers I preferred at that time. The Triangle wasn't as neutral as the English norm, but there was something appealing about its soundsomething that, I later learned, Stereophile's founder, J. Gordon Holt, referred to as jump factor.

For exhibitors, showing off their products at audio shows is a crap shoot. The vagaries of arbitrarily assigned hotel rooms with unpredictable acoustics can play havoc with the sound of even the best-sounding systems. But over the years I've been attending shows, Joseph Audio's dems have always impressed me with how Jeff Joseph manages to set up his speakers so that they work with instead of against a hotel room's acoustics. Yes, Joseph's setup skills, going back to his days in audio retail, play an important role here. But his speakers, too, need to be of sufficiently high quality to benefit from those skills. And if they can be made to sing in a hotel room, they will also stand a better-than-usual chance of doing so in audiophiles' homes.

A year or so ago, in my review of the Pass Labs XP-30 preamplifier, I wrote that the heart of an audio system is the preamplifier, in that it sets the overall quality of the system's sound. But it is the power amplifier that is responsible for determining the character of the system's sound, because it is the amplifier that must directly interface with the loudspeakers. The relationship between amplifier and loudspeaker is complex, and the nature of that relationship literally sets the tone of the sound quality.

For Jason Victor Serinus, one of the highlights of the 2013 T.H.E. Show in Newport Beach, California, was the public debut of the Sopraninoa horn-loaded, self-polarized, electrostatic supertweeter from EnigmAcoustics. In his report, Jason wrote about the sound of a pair of Sopraninos used atop Magico V3 speakers: "only folks with severe hearing loss would have missed how the sound opened up when the Sopranino was switched in." Well, as you can read later, I don't have hearing loss, and I did also hear an improvement with the Sopranino. So when I visited the Californian company's dem room at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, I asked for review samples.

It was the summer of 2000. We had closed Stereophile's office in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the City Different in the Land of Enchantment, where the magazine had been headquartered since 1978, and moved lock, stock, and audio systems to New York City. Once I got to New York, I needed an editorial assistant. Stephen Mejias became that assistant in August 2000, at the age of 21.

Mauro Grange, CEO of Fine Sounds SpA, and Charlie Randall, longtime President of McIntosh Laboratory, Inc., have announced their plans for a management buyout of Fine Sounds Group in partnership with LBO France and Yarpa. The acquisition will facilitate greater opportunities for global collaborations amongst the product development, marketing, distribution and finance teams of each of the Group's portfolio of brands, which includes Sonus Faber, Audio Research Corporation, Wadia Digital, Sumiko and McIntosh.